My Final Will and Testament – Achievements – Reflection #12

13 Jun 2024 4 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

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Last year at my 40th Demontreville Retreat, one of the exercises that we were given by the Retreat Master included a very challenging set of thoughts.  The worksheet for the activity was labeled as “A Testament.” I took the worksheet and instructions home with me.  It had fourteen tasks or reflections to complete.  I did not desire to complete them during the retreat.  It is now almost a year since my retreat, and I have decided to make the mental and emotional effort necessary to complete this “Testament.”

The worksheet started with these instructions:

Imagine that this is the last day of your life on earth.  In the time that you have left, you want to leave a “Testament” for your family and friends.  Each of the following could serve as chapter headings for your “Testament.”  This is Reflection Number 12 on the worksheet.

12.  These are my life’s achievements.

Since this is number 12 on my worksheet, I am simply going to list 12 things that I think I have accomplished.  Mind you, I do not believe that I am done or that I finished any of the following tasks.  I think they are all works in process, and I will continue working on them until my last breath.  Here are my 12 Life Achievements:

  1. I have made some people happy
  2. I have helped many people lead more successful lives
  3. I have had two great wives and a wonderful daughter
  4. I have had many good friends over the years
  5. I have tried to live a life of honesty and integrity
  6. I have never kissed anyone’s butt for a promotion or other benefits
  7. I have helped promote good will between unions and corporate management
  8. I have left thoughts and ideas which will serve as a reminder of how people could live more productive lives
  9. I have taken risks where it would have been more prudent to play it safe
  10. I have supported many charities and funds for people that need help regardless of what country they are from
  11. I have been open minded about exploring new ideas, new music, new travels, new food, new friends, and new work
  12. I have tried my best to be a good friend, a good father, a good husband and a good person

I again reiterate the fact that most of my above activities or achievements are not finished.  I will deign not to give myself a report card on any of them.  I will leave it to others and to the people that come after me to describe my life in more clinical terms.  For now, I am proud that these are the things that I have tried to achieve and that I have valued in my life.

“We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community… Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.” —  Cesar Chavez

“Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.” — Confucious

“The only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them.”  — Michelle Obama

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Next Reflections:    I am listing the final two.  I will return to the task of completing my Final Will and Testament in September.

  1. These are the people who are enshrined in my heart
  2. These are my unfilled desires

I will be gone for the summer, but you can continue to read my blogs.  I have scheduled some blogs to be posted from several years past that I doubt many of you have read.  I hope you will read and comment on them.  I look forward to visiting my site and seeing what you think.  Do my “old” musings stand the test of time?

Unfucking Believable !!!!

21 Jul 2023 7 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

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New Florida standards teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills — ABC News

 

Florida history lesson: Slavery as an unpaid internship? Tampa Bay Times

 

The standards, which were blasted by a statewide teachers’ union as a “step backward,” were approved Wednesday by the State Board of Education.

 

How could anyone calling themselves an educator have approved a piece of crap like these new history standards?  There should be a special place in Hell for anyone with so little professional integrity than they would cave in on principles and truths to support DeSantis’s racist agenda.  

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The following information puts a lie to the idea that slaves felt any benefit from the South’s “Peculiar Institution.”  Only racists, liars and idiots believe or try to sell the idea that slaves wanted to exist in such an institution.  The following information points out how totally idiotic is the propositions advanced by supporters of Florida’s new history standards.  

“Numerous slave rebellions and insurrections took place in North America during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. There is documentary evidence of more than 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings involving ten or more slaves. One of the first was at San Miguel de Gualdape, the first European settlement in what would become the United States. Three of the best known in the United States during the 19th century are the revolts by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, and Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.

Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness invented by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 that allegedly caused black slaves to run away. Today, drapetomania is considered an example of pseudoscience, and part of the edifice of scientific racism.

Slave resistance in the antebellum South did not gain the attention of academic historians until the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker started publishing the first serious scholarly work [27] on the subject. Aptheker stressed how rebellions were rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances.” — Wikipedia

Maybe we should start an internship program for White students where we beat and whip them.  Keep them locked up in chains.  Rape their wives and lovers.  Send their children away.  Starve them when they don’t study or work hard enough.  We can see how much this “motivation” helps them to learn “useful” life skills. 

Facing America’s Real Problems:  Part 2 – The Failure of Education

07 May 2023 8 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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One of my writing goals is to simplify the complexity of the problems facing the USA today.  This effort is like trying to find my way through a very complex maze.  An instructor of mine once told me that “anytime you study a problem, it becomes more complex.”  I agree with his analysis, but I also like the Zen thought that when we start studying a mountain, it first becomes a complex amalgamation of physics, geology, geography, chemistry, and biology.  However, once we really understand it, it becomes a mountain again.  A Zen cycle of simplicity, complexity and then simplicity.

This is the problem facing my analysis of the Education System in America.  It is complex and overwhelming.  I have been working in the system for almost fifty years now.  I have taught every grade from pre-kindergarten to college Ph.D.  classes.  I have written several blogs on this subject already.  However, as each day goes by, what I have said the day before seems less and less adequate.  Many friends have disputed my thoughts on education.  They think that I am wrong, and that the system can be saved by some tweaks here and there.  I disagree.  I have not changed my thoughts on this problem.  We need an entirely new concept and system of Public Education.

The Public Education System in America is like a bomb that has exploded.  You cannot put the bomb back together even if you do manage to find all the pieces of the bomb.  The Public Education System in America is dysfunctional and outdated.  It is rapidly disintegrating as the many outside forces that impact it are ignored or mishandled.  The most important of these forces involve technological and social changes, but they also include a well-funded political effort on the Right to privatize education.

The rich in America understand that Public Education is not serving the needs of students and families.  Those with money and power are cannibalizing the present Public Education System with vouchers and charters to establish elite schools for the wealthy and privileged.  The dream of a Public Education System which would prepare all children with the tools and skills needed to be successful in a Democratic society has been abandoned by many in this country.  We are moving towards a two-tier system of education.  Much like we have one system of justice for the rich and powerful and another for the poor and underprivileged, we are moving towards the same structure in our schools

For the past seven years, I have been working as a substitute teacher in two different high schools in my local area.  While I think many of the same problems plague elementary schools and universities, there are notable differences.  Thus, in this blog, I want to focus on the problems that I have seen over the past few years that high schools are trying to deal with.

The two high schools where I am teaching are comprised of mainly low-income students in an area of low-income families.  The two high schools I substitute for received the following ratings by Public School Review based on a comparison of test scores statewide.

High School 1 -Rating: 2/10 Bottom 50%

High School 2- Rating: 4/10 Bottom 50%

Arizona ranked worst state in America for teachers, study says

Arizona public school system ranked worst in America; study says

The results for Arizona are dismal and put Arizona at the bottom of states in terms of supporting education.  However, I do not believe that these statistics should lead anyone to feel that Arizona is simply a bad state for education.  In the first place, ratings and rankings only tell a portion of the story.  I have seen many schools across this country.  I doubt that the problems in Arizona are much different than for most public schools in America.

We have a systems problem here and my best guess is that most public high schools will be within three standard deviations of a mean around test scores or any other rating scales you can use.  Thus, using the same statistical methods we use for determining the quality of any process, it would be foolish to say that any one school is clearly better than the rest.  The same forces are at play across this country in our public schools.  We are looking at a system and not simply a group of isolated schools.

The following are the major forces causing the deterioration of Public High Schools today.   I will address each of these in more detail.

  1. Technology that replaces traditional skills learned in school. g., AI replacing writing skills
  2. Lock step education methods
  3. Low investment in education by students and parents
  4. Lack of student discipline
  5. Attacks by politicians on the Right who are pandering to voters and parents at the expense of teachers and students
  6. Over emphasis on testing and high school rankings

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  1. Technology that replaces traditional skills learned in school.  g., AI replacing writing skills

Years ago, in 1975 when I was doing my student internship for my undergraduate teaching degree, I allowed my students in my classes to use calculators.  The math teachers in the school were appalled but I did not desist.  They went to the principal who ordered me to stop allowing my students to use calculators.  “What, he said if the batteries went bad?  How would they do any math?”  I replied, “What if their pencils ran out of lead?”  He was not amused.

From calculators to computers to cell phones to the internet and now Artificial Intelligence, the world that students live in today bears little or no resemblance to the world that many of us once knew.  However, the fundamental problem here is not technology.  Marshal McLuhan nailed the problem fifty years ago.  The world outside schools is now richer and more dense with knowledge and skills than the world inside schools.  Once upon a time, students went to a dense environment of wise instructors, libraries and books that were unavailable to the wider community.  Today, a child of three holds in their hands more knowledge than in the Library of Congress.  That child is also exposed to ideas from all over the world and not just Po-Dunk Iowa.  Schools cannot compete with this.  Schools are becoming more and more irrelevant.  Students know this but parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians either are blind to the fact or too vested in the present system to seek major changes.

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  1. Lock step education methods: 

Standardized testing.  Standardized curriculums.  Grades following one after another in silent marching precision.  Our nation seems obsessed with insuring that everyone marches to the same drummer.  Do you have children?  Do you see anything identical about each child?  Take a classroom of 32 students and how many of them will be identical in knowledge, skills, abilities, and interests?

Now put 32 students, Latino, African American, Asian American, White American, and Native American all in an English class studying Romeo and Juliet in old English.  How many of them do you think will be interested?  I did not find an interest in Shakespeare until I was nearly fifty years old.  My interest really began when I discovered something that high school English teachers seem to ignore.  Plays were meant to be watched not read.  They were never written to be read.  And if they were read, they should be in a language that someone might understand.  I watch many BBC shows on the tele and I use the English subtitles to understand what they are saying otherwise I am lost.  I assume that the British are using some version of “Modern English.”  They still argue that Americans do not speak English.

We need a system of Customized Education for all students today.  My program of Free Public Education would start with three-year-old and extend to ninety plus year old.  In other words, I want Free Public education for life and not just for a temporary time in youth.  We say that people are our most important assets.  We need to start treating them like they are important.  We need to provide life-time education that will continue to prepare citizens for careers today, tomorrow, and next year.

teachers

  1. Low investment in education by students and parents:

Here is a law.  “If people have no investment in something they do not value it.  When people are invested, they value it more.”  Parents send their schools to free public schools.  Students go to school for free until college and sometimes even to college for free.  Many parents value schools for their babysitting function rather than for the purpose that schools were designed to serve.  Parents are irate when schools and teachers go on strike.  However, across America schools and teachers are at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to funding.  I have seen more than eighty percent of funding requests here in Arizona vetoed in referendums since 2010.  This comes at a time when funding for teachers and schools in Arizona ranks at the bottom of the US list of states.

I am for “Free Public Education” but that means in terms of money individually paid by parents and teachers for education.  That does not mean I think students and parents should be given a Free Lunch.  Indeed, I want to see accountability on the part of students and families for the education that their children will receive.  Parents and students should have accountability not in terms of monetary compensation but in terms of time donated to the education system.  They need to have a program in education whereby parents and students support public education using time allotments paid to the schools.  One of the teacher aides I worked with a few weeks ago suggested that she would like to see parents with their children in school sitting in class with their kids on a regular rotating basis.  This is a great idea but only one of many that could be instituted to help ensure that students and parents have a vested interest in education.

students

  1. Lack of student discipline:

Student discipline is a major problem in public schools today.  I have seen teachers and substitutes walk out of school after their first day on the job.  Schools today are loaded with security guards and even armed police in some schools.  On any daily roster of students there will be a few serving in-school suspension and some serving out-of-school suspension.  Every year, I see more and more students in detention.

Kids behave towards teachers with the same arrogance that their parents may have for teachers and education.  The poorer the classroom in terms of demographics, the worse the discipline will be.  It does not matter whether the class is Black, White, Brown, or Red, the poorer the social economic status of the class, the more behavior problems you have in the classroom.  The wealthier people are the more they seem to value education.  This is not a hard and fast rule, but a general observation based on my almost fifty plus years of teaching.  This is one of the reasons so many of the wealthy are pulling their kids out of public schools.

Today, teachers are so little respected that many of them are afraid to discipline their students.  I had a security guard tell me that she would not intervene in a fight between students as she did not want to take the risk of either being hurt or sued.  Teachers should not have to be disciplinarians.  Once upon a time, when I was a young, if I disobeyed a teacher and my father found out about it, I was punished.  This was typical of my generation.  No questions asked.  The teachers was right, and I was wrong.  Somewhere in the mid-seventies, there was a sea change of major proportions.  Suddenly, teachers were besieged with challenges like “What did you do to make my Johnny or Mary act out?”  “It is your (teachers) fault that my child is failing.”  Teachers are now in the wrong when students are disciplined or given a failing grade.  There is little or no support among many families for teachers.  The teacher is wrong.  The student is right.

A few nights ago, before a concert, I sat with two other retired teachers.  We discussed the sea change I noted above and what the potential causes were.  Here were some theories”

  • The teachings of Benjamin Spock were too liberal
  • Parents feel guilty they do not spend enough time with their children
  • Single parent families lack the ability to discipline their children
  • TV promoting a set of values antagonistic towards education
  • Too many people that were not well served by public school education in the past

At the time, I did not challenge any of these theories.  I simply listened and questioned.  Over the next few days, I found something wrong with each theory.  I am still searching for the reason.  I welcome any ideas you may have.  Please leave them in the comments section.  I will try to think about and reply to each idea.  Nevertheless, discipline is a major problem, and it will go away unless we understand its root cause.  One solution might be to have parents join their children for in-school suspensions or pay a fine for out of school suspensions.  Perhaps that could be a “Parental Responsibility.”  I think it would put a rapid stop to much of the behavior problems that teachers have to put up with today.

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  1. Attacks by politicians on the Right who are pandering to voters and parents at the expense of teachers and students

The Right Wing in this country want to destroy Public School Education.  They are waging a war on education every single day of the year in every single state in the Union.  They are engaging the families of children with promises of “Parental Rights.”  This panders to the same parents that have a low respect for education and believe that schools are brainwashing their children.  This has been an issue among White Supremacists and Southern Bigots since the early years of the Jim Crow laws.  This group is (though they would deny it) racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic.  They are against Gay Rights, Minority Rights, Women’s Rights, and Immigrant Rights.  They are for “Parental Rights” but not a word for “Parental Responsibilities.”

The right wing politicians will say anything to curry votes.  They tell parents that books are pornographic or racist.  Their tell parents that their kids are being brainwashed by liberal teachers.  School boards are now being packed with radical parents who want to fire school superintendents, principals, and teachers over what is taught and how it is taught.  In fact, I can point to some of each of the above groups that have been fired in the past few weeks here in Arizona.  Books are being banned in over thirty states in America and librarians are fearful for their jobs.  Politicians are enacting laws whereby teachers can be fined and charged with a crime for teaching certain topics like Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies or Sex Education.

In my seventy-seven years on this earth, I have worked with all sorts of people.  But never have I seen a less moral or ethical group than the politicians that now sit mostly in the Republican Party.  I have seldom believed in conspiracy theories ever since reading C. Wright Mills, “The Power Elite.”  He argued convincingly to me at the time that the wealthy and powerful in America may seem to be working together but it was actually mutual interests that dedicated their actions rather than any coordinated planning or circumspect effort.

Wright Mills is probably now rolling over in his grave. There is an interlocking and well-coordinated group of Right-Wing organizations in this country which plan, fund, and orchestrate major efforts to elect politicians that support their interests, to push laws and bills that support their interests and to block any efforts to make their planning and funding more transparent.  If you doubt what I am saying, look up the following names on Wikipedia and see what you conclude.  Pay attention to the organizations they serve and their reliance on dark money for their activities.  I think you will see more than just a casual converging of interests in their activities.  They are orchestrating well-funded efforts to destroy public education.

What can we do about this situation?  Is America doomed by money, power politics and large corporate interests that are overriding the public good?  Many would say that the end is near.  That the democracy we hoped for in this country is over.  That we the people are powerless to change a juggernaut that is fueled by rich billionaires and served by minions with law degrees and no morals or ethics.

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  1. Over emphasis on testing and high school rankings:

A well-intentioned effort to insure quality in schools.  Unfortunately based on stupidity and ignorance of statistics and relevance.   My teacher here was Dr. W. Edward Deming.  The noted quality expert and pioneer who helped the Japanese become world leaders in quality.  Deming was against ratings and rankings that were often used in business to assess employee performance.  The same logic that he used to refute the relevance of these ratings apply to the schools system of ratings and rankings.  Deming said:

“Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review… The idea of a merit rating is alluring.  The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good.  The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise… The fact is that the system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.”

If you look at the ratings for schools anyplace in America, you will find that the wealthier the area in which the school is located, the higher their rankings will be in testing and all other metrics.  Here in Arizona, my two schools are in the bottom twenty-five percent of schools in terms of rankings.  Scottdale has the highest ranked schools in the system.  It is no surprise that Scottsdale also has the highest per capital income in the state.  The wealthier the school district the higher their performance rating will be.  Nevertheless, I would not assume that students from Scottsdale have any greater native ability than my students.  I would only assume that they do better on standardized tests.

A few years ago, I took the Forbes 200 list of richest people in the world.  About sixty percent of them had a college degree.  Forty percent never went to college or did not finish a degree.  I did a correlation analysis to see what the strength was between net worth and education.  I was quite surprised to find that the average net worth of those without a college degree was 1.5 billion dollars higher than those with a college degree.  3.5 Billion net worth with no college degree versus 2.0 Billion for those with a college degree.  College has been overhyped as a path to success.

Ratings and rankings are no measure of life success or even of learning to think.  I would argue that the people who excel on college standardized tests are less able to think for themselves and more likely to conform to norms of thinking and behavior.  Regard all the lawyers in America who have gone to Harvard, Yale and Cornell but seem to have little or no ethics or standards other than winning or money.  Both Deming and J. K. Galbraith wrote about the sorry state of MBA programs in America when it came to teaching ethics and morals.  We have too many students now who excel on standardized tests but have no morals or ethics.  They have learned that these things do not matter.

Conclusions:

Here is the part where we live happily ever after.  The good guy wins, the bad guy loses.  Right triumphs over might, and justice wins out over injustice.  If only this were true.  Maybe as Martin Luther King said, justice will eventually prevail.  I am not so sure he is right anymore.  All empires since the Akkadian Empire in 2330 BCE, (Arguably the first empire in history) have ebbed and waned and eventually declined.  Many have predicted that the USA is now on the downward path.  I will say one thing.  Our Founding Fathers knew that a public education system was the cornerstone of a democratic society. Thomas Jefferson said:

”I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”

Without a Free, Egalitarian and Open Public Education System, America will continue any decline that many believe has already started. 

PS:  Today I noticed that Jim Hightower had also published some thoughts on Education.  I am providing a link to his thoughts as well.  He is a good writer and I always enjoy reading his ideas.  He has a great sense of humor.

Chicken Little Attacks America’s Teachers

Why the Three R’s are Obsolete and Should be Replaced by the Three C’s

06 Mar 2022 8 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

types of learning styles article blog

Once upon a time.  (You can’t help but love my blog this week since we know that all great stories begin with “once upon a time.”)  Anyway, not to be repetitious, I will note that long long ago, people knew that to be really educated you must learn the three R’s.  The three R’s were a short cut for “Reading, Writing and Rithmetic.  Just to make things symmetrical or rhyming, they had to deliberately misspell or at least mis-pronounce arithmetic.  Doesn’t seem like a very erudite way to introduce an essential concept of education by misspelling a key concept.

Nevertheless, for over a two hundred years now, (The phrase appears to have been coined at the beginning of the 19th century.) these three concepts or methodologies have become the essential elements that EVERYONE knows schools must teach.  Politicians all over the land demand that schools in their states or in their districts will do everything they can to ensure that these concepts are taught.  Standardized tests are developed to make sure that students have proficiency in these concepts.  Students are drilled, drilled some more, tested, and tested some more.  And still in most public schools, a large majority of students cannot pass these tests.

School board meetings attended by irate parents ask why their kids are still failing the standardized tests meant to determine how assiduously they have learned their 3 R’s.  Politicians clamor for better teachers at lower pay and with more responsibilities but less power to enforce discipline or attention.  Classrooms are rife with students all of whom have cellphones that have more knowledge than the teachers standing up in front of their classes.  Teachers are blamed for teaching extraneous subjects like civility, manners, sex education, health education, racism, and holocaust history.  Back to basics scream the politicians.  Back to basics scream the irate parents.  Back to basics meaning reading, writing and rithmetic.

Ideas are bandied about to improve teachers. 

Pay them more?  “Nope, not enough money in the school budget.  Can’t afford any more taxes to pay for education.”

More stringent tests for teachers?  “Sounds like a good idea but where have all the teachers gone?”

Make it a felony to teach subjects that do not relate to the 3 R’s?    “Great idea, just as soon as we can find anyone willing to go into education, we will pass a law wherein we can convict errant teachers who dare to ignore the 3 R’s”

The irony of this entire effort is that the 3 R’s are obsolete.  They have been for a long time now.  Assuming that schools survive (see my articles are why schools are obsolete) they should replace the 3 R’s with what I call the 3 C’s.  The three R’s are obsolete in the sense that their focus is too narrow.  The 3 C’s would entail a broader focus that would allow students more latitude in what they learn while also teaching them concepts for the twenty-first century.  Of course, money must still be allocated for education and teachers must still be paid a decent salary or no one will be qualified to teach anything whether it starts with an R or a C.  However, please be patient while I explain the difference between the three C’s and the three R’s.

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Comprehension versus Reading:

The ability to read and understand text is a skill but narrowly focused on written materials.  The ability to comprehend meaning entails not only understanding the written word but also understanding such mediums as:

  • Music
  • Art
  • Lectures
  • Dance
  • Politics
  • Religion

Each of these mediums can convey a message that is just as powerful as the written word.  An educated person should be capable of divining the message carried by a great work of art or a great piece of music just as they would interpret a written story.  Politics and religion always carry messages and a citizen should be able to critically interpret the various messages and signals that are used by political and religious leaders.

Effective-Leadership-Connecting-vs.-Communicating

Communication versus Writing:

We write to communicate with others.  However, we also communicate with voice messages, podcasts, movies, videos, computers, spoken stories, sign and other languages.  Computer programming is a language that should be treated just as important as learning English.  Multiple languages need to be taught at an early age to all students.  Being bi or multilingual is a critical skill in todays global world.

The world of the 21st Century is for many young people, a visual world.  One filled with video games, YouTube channels, Podcasts and instant videos that are made on the fly.  Students need to learn the ins and outs of the various media that are available for communicating to the world and not just good penmanship or writing skills.

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Computation versus Rithmetic:

I am sitting here on my computer.  I have an Amazon Echo about three feet away.  In front of me, I have my old calculator.  Years ago when I was student teaching (1975), I was chastised by the math teachers in the high school where I was doing my student practicum for allowing my students to use calculators for some computational problems.  I was warned that students would never learn how to do math problems if I let them use calculators.  Seven years later, the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) agreed that it was ok to allow students to use calculators in their classrooms.

Today, the battle still rages over the best ways to teach students math skills.  I need to know the square root of 3750, so I call out to Alexa “What is the square root of 3750?”  She answers me in less than five seconds: “The square root of 3750 is 61.2372.”  I reply, “Thank you.”  Alexa replies “Anytime.”

If I were to do this short easy problem, with a pen and pencil, there are good odds that I would make a mistake and come up with the wrong answer.  Even if I did not make a mistake, solving this simple problem would take me two to five minutes.  Regard the steps for solving the problem using long division.  There are six steps.

Step 1)

Set up 3750 in pairs of two digits from right to left and attach one set of 00 because we want one decimal:

37        50        00

Step 2)

Starting with the first set: the largest perfect square less than or equal to 37 is 36, and the square root of 36 is 6. Therefore, put 6 on top and 36 at the bottom like this:

6

37        50        00

36

Step 3)

Calculate 37 minus 36 and put the difference below. Then move down the next set of numbers.

6

37        50        00

36

1          50

Step 4)

Double the number in green on top: 6 × 2 = 12. Then, use 12 and the bottom number to make this problem:

12? × ? ≤ 150

The question marks are “blank” and the same “blank”. With trial and error, we found the largest number “blank” can be is 1. Replace the question marks in the problem with 1 to get:

121 × 1 = 121.

Now, enter 1 on top, and 121 at the bottom:

6          1

37        50        00

36

1          50

1          21

Step 5)

Calculate 150 minus 121 and put the difference below. Then move down the next set of numbers.

6          1

37        50        00

36

1          50

1          21

0          29        00

Step 6)

Double the number in green on top: 61 × 2 = 122. Then, use 122 and the bottom number to make this problem:

122? × ? ≤ 2900

The question marks are “blank” and the same “blank”. With trial and error, we found the largest number “blank” can be is 2. Now, enter 2 on top:

6          1          2

37        50        00

36

1          50

1          21

0          29        00

The answer is on top. The square root of 3750 with one digit decimal accuracy is 61.2.

Alexa solved the problem in less than 5 seconds and to four decimal places.  Why the hell would anyone want to use long-division to solve this problem lies well outside the limits of my intelligence to imagine? Perhaps they are masochists?  Crazy?  Do not have access to anything but a pencil and paper?

Computation is indeed one of the most important skills anyone can learn.  However, computation is defined as:

“Computation is any type of calculation that includes both arithmetical and non-arithmetical steps and which follows a well-defined model. Mechanical or electronic devices that perform computations are known as computers. An especially well-known discipline of the study of computation is computer science.” — Wikipedia

Everyone needs computation skills.  However, not everyone needs to use long-division to solve problems.  If your goal is to design a bridge, build a house, balance a budget, file your income taxes, you will need computation skills.  Sometimes, you will need to understand some mathematical concepts depending on your needs and priorities.  However, I get by with a calculator, computer and Alexa and seldom do my hands see either a pencil or paper.

Conclusions:

I have said many times that the model of schooling being used in the world today is obsolete, useless, and dysfunctional.  See my article:  Creating a 21st Century Education System.  The changes we need to have a valuable system of public education go well beyond simply substituting the 3 C’s for the 3 R’s.  I would do a grave injustice to the problem if I thought it were this simple.  Expanding and broadening the concepts being taught in schools today is only one small element that needs to be addressed to develop citizens who can use critical thinking skills to solve problems, perform useful societal tasks and select leaders who can make a positive contribution to society.

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Today, we have a system of mass education being systemically destroyed by an elite that knows the system is dysfunctional but sees the solution as taking their kids to private academies.  The problems of most public schools are not as evident in these private institutions but the learning that goes on is no more useful than what is being taught in the public schools.  Still perhaps ten percent of students will benefit from the traditional model of education but that leaves 90 percent of our population who will be unfit to manage a democratic form of government.  In the USA today, we are not only witnessing the decline and fall of public education, but we are on the verge of destroying a democracy that relies on a free and impartial press, an educated citizenry, and a free and fair system of elections.  Take away any one of these three and you destroy democracy.  We seem to be working on destroying all three.

Why Public-School Education is Dying – Part 3 of 5 Parts

08 Jan 2022 3 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

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In Part 1 of this blog on education, I stated that, “I am going to dive into the major reasons that are leading to the death of public-school education.”  In this part, we will look at the role that our political leaders play in murdering public school education in America.

How our politicians are helping to kill public school education

Kill or murder?  I have used both words to describe what the Right-Wing political faction is trying to do to public school education.  Let me be clear on this point.  The Right-Wing politicians and their cronies in the media are systematically and deliberately trying to destroy public school education and any semblance of a free and open democratic educational system whether it be in kindergarten or in a university.

Liberals in America have always supported at least in a token sense a system of democratic free public-school education.  Their support dwindles when it comes to the university level.  When it comes to eliminating elitism in schools and eliminating anti-intellectual bias, liberals have too often watched from the sidelines when conservatives have been on the attack.  This is to say that conservatives support elitism and anti-intellectualism while liberals twiddle their thumbs and remain silent.

I want to trace a chronological picture of the attack on public education from when I first noticed it up until this past week.  We will start by going back to 1973 when my daughter entered kindergarten.

1973

I was twenty-seven years old and had been married for six years.  We were living in Providence R.I., and I was attending Rhode Island College days and working nights.  My daughter Christy had been in a Montessori School since she was three and my wife was working part-time.  With Christy turning six soon we decided to enroll her in a public school.  Two advantages for us were cost and proximity.  The public school would be free, and it was only a few blocks from where we lived.

I walked down to the public school to see about enrolling Chris.  When I arrived, I was shocked.  The school had broken windows all over and the ones that had been repaired had thick Plexiglas installed inside of windowpanes.  The school yard was full of junk and debris.  The whole place looked like a prison that had just survived a prison riot.  I turned around and went home.  I was never going to send my daughter to this school.  I would sell my soul first.

After some discussion with my wife Julia, we found that our only option was an expensive private school up the “East” side of Providence near Brown University where all the rich people lived.  The school was called Gordon.

The Gordon School is a racially diverse nursery through eighth grade coeducational independent school in East Providence, Rhode Island.  Child by child, the Gordon School community cultivates successful students by inspiring joyful learning, encouraging intellectual leadership, fostering an empathic spirit, and stimulating a drive for positive societal impact.

The tuition at the time was a fortune for us.  We were living in a 3rd floor apartment and paying 75 dollars a month rent.  We budgeted everything including purchasing light bulbs.  The cost for Gordon in 1974 was almost 3 thousand dollars a year.  Currently, the tuition varies by scholarships and financial aid but the web lists Gordon tuition for 2021 as $39,000 a year.  For us, it was either this or send Chris to the dilapidated run-down school I had visited.  Christy went to Gordon for two years until I graduated college.  After graduating with a degree in Health Education, our family moved to a small town in Wisconsin called River Falls.  There Christy was entered into the public school system where she remained until after high school.

At the time, I never made any connection between Republicans and their desire to destroy public school education.  I was pretty radical in my politics, and I voted Socialist Labor, Citizens Party, Green Party and any other party except for Republicans or Democrats.  I did not like conservatives or liberals.  The only thing I was aware of was that teachers were low paid and public schools in the inner cities were severely under-funded.  Things were much better for public education in small towns like River Falls.

1982

I enter a doctorate program at the University of Minnesota in Vocational Education.  I read “Anti-intellectualism in American Life.”  This book was written by Richard Hofstadter in 1963 and in 1964 won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

“Here the politician expresses what a large part of the public feels.  The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts, but he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor, the irresponsible brain truster, or the mad scientist, and by applauding the politicians as they pursue the subversive teacher, the suspect scientist, or the allegedly treacherous foreign-policy adviser.  There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies.” — R. Hofstader

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After reading Hofstader’s book, I began to see a connection between politics in America and the problems with public education funding.  I still did not see any conspiracy and I just assumed it was a case of prejudice and bias with random attacks against education.

1997

I finished my Ph.D. program in 1986 and had been working with a management consulting firm for seven years before going on my own in 1993.  I was now working part-time as a private consultant and teaching part-time at Metro State University in Minneapolis.  I would drive to school to teach MBA night classes.  On my way to school, I would turn on AM 1440 Patriot Radio and listen to Mike Savage, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham, and Mike Medved.  They were all extreme right-wing commentators.  I listened to them over four years for two or three nights a week on my commute between White Bear Lake and downtown Minneapolis.

Each one of these commentators were well educated at an American University.  Savage obtained a Ph. D in 1978 from the University of California, Berkeley, in nutritional ethnomedicine.  Hewitt graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a B.A. in government in 1978.  After studying at the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt received his Juris Doctor (JD) degree in 1983.  Ingraham earned a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1985.  She then attended the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was a notes editor for the Virginia Law Review.  She graduated with a Juris Doctor degree in 1991.  Medved entered Yale University as a 16-year-old undergraduate. He received his B.A. with honors in 1969, and later attended Yale Law School, though he did not finish his JD degree.

For over four years, I listened to these “scholars” bash educators.  Bash teachers.  Bash universities.  Bash college professors.  On and on each of them would go night after night after night.  Labels and epithets like commies, pinkos, intellectuals, liberals, socialists, subversives, and anti-American were consistently used to denigrate teachers and professors.  It was assumed and even a creed that most universities and schools had a “liberal” orientation.” To these commentators, a liberal orientation was akin to being aligned with Satan.  A liberal was the devil incarnate and was on the side of “god-less communism.”

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More and more I began to understand that the right-wing hated educators, hated free thinking and hated anything that had any vestige of a liberal arts education associated with it.  I still did not see any conspiracy though and I assumed it was simple ignorance and fanatical beliefs that united the Republicans, White-Supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and other Right-Wing fanatics.

“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”— Thomas Jefferson

2010

I read “The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy” by Joshua Holland.

“We have all grown accustomed to conservative’s conspiracy theories about the corporate media having a far-left bias and college professors indoctrinating American youth into Maoism.”  — J. Holland, 2010

Holland goes on to describe how a cabal of rich right-wing billionaires including the Koch Brothers organized to fund a group of “research centers” such as the Heritage Foundation.  The purpose of these groups was to counter what they saw as a left-wing bias in education and the media.  These groups heralded the start of organized right-wing think tanks to fund laws, bills, newspapers, radio shows and other narratives that would combat liberalism and progressivism in American politics.  These groups would routinely rely on the strategies of Madison Avenue to get their messages across.

masksI began to see more clearly that the right wing was orchestrating a systematic attack against not only universities but also against public school education.  However, it has only been in the last few years that I realized how ubiquitous this assault was.  The appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education under Trump was a message that meant the right-wing were more powerful than anyone had yet realized.  The attack on public education is now an all-out assault.

What I still did not see was how the now noticeable decline in public support for American Democracy was highly correlated with the right-wing attack on public education.  The right-wing and their political allies have been undermining public education with a goal to replace it with a system of elite education.  The purpose of right-wing education is to train people not how to think but what to think.  Fundamentalists, technocrats, wealthy elites, corporations, and right-wing politicians see no value in “free-thinkers.”  If you believe Thomas Jefferson, democracy can only survive with people who know how to think and not just what to think.

November 2, 2021

D. Vance, a Republican candidate for Senator of Ohio gave a keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference (November 2, 2021) titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” He said:

“I think in this movement of national conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is wisdom.  And there is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago. He said, and I quote: ‘The professors are the enemy.’”

downloadOn his campaign website, under the heading “Protect Conservative Values,” Vance complains that “hundreds of billions of American tax dollars” get sent to universities that “teach that America is an evil, racist nation.” These universities “then train teachers who bring that indoctrination into our elementary and high schools.”  The speakers and presenters at this conference read like a “who’s who” of Trump loyalists and big lie theorists.

Finally, it is clear to me that a conspiracy or call it a concerted effort exists to defund public schooling, to undermine confidence in public education and to create a system of private for-profit schools or elitist academies that will educate the rich.  The poor will be left where the poor have always been left, at the bottom of the heap.  Democracy will be destroyed, and authoritarians will dictate religion, politics, education, and work rules.  There will be no independent thinking in America since independent thinking and democracy go hand in hand.

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December 16, 2021

I pick up the local newspaper, the Casa Grande Dispatch to read an article discussing a curriculum debate at a school board meeting.  Seems as though several people are challenging the right of the schools and educators to decide what should be in the curriculum.  Conservative parents and right-wing politicians are increasingly trying to dictate curriculum.  Often their assumptions about education or ill-formed and simply ignorant.  Regard the quote from one of the attendees at this meeting:

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“Once this curriculum is in place they will have to teach it, whether they agree with it or not.” Said David Logue, a deacon at Passion Church in Casa Grande.  “Although I don’t have a lot of information on this, I am against it.  It is ungodly.”

This deacon admits that he does not know much about it, but he is “AGAINST IT,” because it is “UNGODLY.”  How can any intelligent person be against something, without even knowing what they are against?  And to call it ungodly?  What in heavens name is “ungodly” curriculum?  Episodes like this are taking place all across the USA and they are not isolated instances.  They are not random happenings.  The right-wing politicians have been fanning the embers of discontent with the public schools in this country for some time now and the results can be seen at school board meetings in every state in the Union.  No one is clamoring for more education about democracy and freedom of speech.  Instead they are screaming because of things they know little or nothing about like Critical Race Theory and Diversity Education.

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December 29, 2021

“Republicans eye new front in education wars: Making school board races partisan” by Andrew Atterbury and Juan Perez Jr.  The assault on education today is not just about Critical Race Theory or Diversity Education.  It is a war on school boards to help determine the course of American Politics.  It is not a question of teaching students “how” to think, it is a question of teaching them “what” to think.  Make no mistake, the conservatives and Republican Party want to turn the clock back on history.  They want a one-party majority of white conservative reactionaries.  They have a design for a “white” America free of the influence of minorities, women, the poor and the less educated.  This design is not based on a balanced diet of hopes and dreams and visions of what America could be.  It is not based on any concept of democracy by the people and for the people.  It is based on a unilateral one-sided elitist view of what education is for and who should receive education.

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“There’s still no equality in education,” said Young, a plaintiff in a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center to keep public money in two Tennessee school districts instead of diverting the funds to unaccountable private schools. “To me, it’s still a form of segregation.” — Weekend Read: 66 years after Brown v. Board, schools across the South still separate and unequal

The problem has been that good liberals and progressives have not realized that a war on education is being waged.  This months Southern Poverty Leadership Report (Winter 2021, Volume 51, Number 4) has an article titled, “Calculated:  The right’s attack on the U.S. education system.”  The words in the title are very appropriate.  The attack is “calculated.”  The battle for school board partisanship is being supported by a coalition of conservative leaders — including representatives of the Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute.

The word “attack” is also appropriate.  We are not talking about reform or change.  Conservatives     want nothing less than the destruction of public-school education.

“Anti-mask efforts are, in essence, anti-public education tactics, a wolf cloaked as libertarian policy designed to devour the public’s fain in public education…. The aim of undermining public education as schools are increasingly gutted of funding and support with each legislative cycle, is to make privatization more appealing than public education.”  Calculated: The right’s attack on the U.S. Education system.

In Summation:

I have given you a chronology of my experiences and insights concerning some of the attacks on public school education by the political right.  I started out by seeing the demise of public-school education due to its paradigmatic inefficiency at meeting the needs of twenty first century students.  Along my journey, I found an all-out political assault on public schools by Republicans and conservatives.  You might think I am being a hypocrite when I condemn the Republicans since I also condemn the current model of public-school education.  However, my solution to providing a democratic education system is very different than what the Republicans want to create.  I will talk more about this difference in the final part of this series on education.

“There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

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John,

I appreciate your observations on trends. As a parent you knew what was best and chose a different school; and today parents want to keep the school and change the curriculum.  Your graphics emphasize each of your points.  Seeing the discontent, the elite provide the alternatives in either charter schools or private schools.  Catholic and other parochial schools, and  religiously affiliated universities were for families who wanted to instill their religious beliefs while educating.  Home education movement does the same.  Again the monetary sacrifice to do so.  The poor have no choice and tolerate what is given in “free”public education. — Socorro 

Why Public-School Education is Dying – Part 2 of 5 Parts

18 Dec 2021 9 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , ,

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In Part 1 of this blog on education, I stated that, “I am going to dive into the major reasons that are leading to the death of public-school education.”  In this part, we will look at

  • Why our present educational model is obsolete

Our present educational model is obsolete because it is based on several faulty principles or assumptions.  Perhaps at one time some of these reasons had some validity but that is no longer true.  We are not living in a 19th century agricultural or a 20th century industrial economy.  We are now in a digital economy that is moving faster than anything the world has ever known.  The following are the most important issues that one must understand to realize why our present educational system is useless.

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  1. Outdated concepts of how education should be conducted

The teaching in the early part of America was based on two principles.  First, that every child needed a broad liberal arts education to be qualified as a good citizen.  Second, that education curriculums would follow a set of orderly progression starting from simple concepts to more complex concepts.  Thus, you would learn simple arithmetic before taking complex subjects like calculus or trigonometry.

The above principles treated every student as though they were the same.  There was no customization.  There were no exceptions to the grading progressions that developed in most schools.  If you were an advanced student, you would need to wait for the less advanced to catch up.  If you were not as advanced, then you looked like the dummy in class and were often ridiculed.  If you were somewhere in-between, you kept your mouth shut and dreamed of the end of the school year.

These principles may have been useful in a society that was information poor.  Marshal McLuhan said that schools made sense when they could bring information to a central point. Prospective students from information poor societies could come together and feast on the abundance of knowledge that was now centralized in one location.  Over time, the reverse has taken place.  Societies and cultures have become much denser and richer in information than any school could possibly hope to capture.  Students today can access more knowledge on their smart phones than probably exists in the entire Library of Congress.

“Today in our cities, most learning occurs outside the classroom. The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly that we’re confused, baffled.” — Marshall McLuhan, excerpt from “Classroom Without Walls,”  Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960)

Treating students as though they are all the same ignores fundamental elements of human skills and abilities.  Some students may have better social skills.  Some have better musical, artistic, and athletic skills than others.  Even in the domain of cognitive knowledge some students excel at math and others excel at English and language.

Just imagine if music was the dominant purpose of education rather than liberal arts.  Children might enroll in schools where the curriculum included violins, drums, harps, guitars, pianos, trumpets, and harmonicas.  Each student would have to learn all of these instruments and get a passing grade in each to graduate school.  It would not matter if a child received an A in violin if they did not pass drums.  If this sounds ridiculous, it should not since it mirrors the way curriculum is handled today.

Furthermore, the system of education assumes that all children would need to progress systematically through learning each instrument.  You would have violin 1 before you had violin 2.  It would not matter if you could do violin 1 when you came to school, you would still be required to take violin 1 before you could take violin 2.  True, in some schools you can test out of a subject but that is still rare in most public high schools.

The idea of holistic learning is totally ignored by the rigid lock step progression that is built into curriculums in both public and private schools.  Fifty years ago I argued with math teachers about the use of calculators in a classroom.  Most felt that students would not learn the proper concepts behind the calculations if they were allowed to use calculators.  Ten years later, the Mathematical Association of America approved the use of calculators in high school classrooms.

The fear of technology is still prevalent in schools as most schools do not allow their students to make use of a smart phone’s capabilities.  In many high school classrooms, students are prohibited from having their cell phones out.  (There is a constant game today between teachers and students to prohibit students from “misusing” their cell phones.)  It is rather funny since some teachers do not restrict cell phone usage and others do.  A few students told me a while ago that they wished their teachers could agree on a “cellphone policy.”  True, many schools give students laptops and tablets, but their usage of these tools are limited to such programs as Blackboard, Desire to Learn and other instructional interfaces.  Students are not taught how to use the power of their cell phones to think.  Teachers often seem afraid of new technology perhaps fearing that it will replace them.  In truth, the times have changed in respect to what a teacher’s role should be.  Looking at the results in the Virginia Governor Race this year, where the pundits believed that parental dissatisfaction played a major role in the election results, I found the following comment.  It was made by one of the consultants that the Loudoun County School District in Virginia hired to incorporate equity and inclusion in their curriculum.

“I think the thing that public education offers… because I certainly don’t think we offer learning… are relationships.  What historically high schools were for was the dissemination of information very quickly…Well, actually, the internet is better than the high school is…Truthfully, the teacher in relation to the dissemination of information is obsolete.”  —Equity Collaborative Leader Jamie Almanza.  

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  1. The concept that more money for educators and educational institutions will result in better student outcomes

During the 15 or so years that I was a management consultant, I often encountered the argument that employees would be more productive if they were paid more.  Now, I am a great believer in paying employees as much as the organization can afford and well beyond a simple livable wage.  I am well aware of the battle between employers and employees over wages and have myself often had to fight to get a salary that I felt was fair.  Nevertheless, I see little or even no correlation between productivity and wages and I have told this to many a manager and employee.  I have frequently asked people if they thought they would be “twice” as productive if I doubled their salaries tomorrow.  No honest person ever told me yes.

Teachers are no different.  Teachers who are paid more will not have more students getting higher test scores. There will not be more students graduating or more students learning more because their teachers are higher paid.  Yes, I believe teachers are underpaid based on their abilities and goals but that does not mean that I think schools will be more effective with higher paid teachers or with more capital outlays per pupil.

I looked at the rankings for Arizona High Schools a few days ago.  (Arizona High School Rankings) The top-rated school in the state was BASIS Scottsdale.  Their average student expenditure was $7, 231.  Their “Average Standard Score” was 99.9.  I then looked at Vista Grande High School where I have been substitute teaching this year.  They were ranked 205th out of 226 public high schools.  The average dollar spent per capita for students was $9,153 dollars.  Their “Average Standard Score” was 14.1.  I briefly looked at the student expenditures for all 226 high schools in Arizona.  I did not calculate a Standard Deviation for the 226 but if I did, my guess would be that all 226 schools would fall within 3 standard deviations of the mean.  I think the mean for “per capital student expenditures” would be about $7,500.

What do the above figures tell me?  First of all that per capita spending is not related to school or student performance.  Second, that there is a correlation between the wealth or affluency of a community and high school student performance.  Put simply, students from poorer families do worse in school than students from more affluent families.  The bad news is that no amount of money poured into any school system in the country is going to change these outcomes.  The World Development Report 2018 shows a similarly weak correlation between spending and learning outcomes.

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  1. The belief that what can be measured is what is important to teach and that standardized tests and curriculums are essential to a quality education

This is another fallacy that I often encountered in my years as a management consultant.  There is some kind of a foolish business quote that says, “What gets measured, gets managed.”  What is more accurate is that “What gets measured, gets gamed.”  My mentor, Dr. W.E. Deming taught his students that a system is more important to performance than the individual.  A favorite saying of Dr. Deming’s was that “A bad system will beat a good performer any time.”  Dr. Deming taught how to measure the performance of a system and then to use those measures to improve the system, not to work on exhorting individuals or individual testing to improve the system.  Two of Dr. Deming’s 14 Points for Management were:

11 a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.

11 b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

12 a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

12 b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.

The standardized tests that are given to students all over America are no help in increasing school performance.  The ranking of schools and the ranking of students has no statistical validity in terms of improving the educational system in America.  In fact, not only are these measures useless, but they are a major impediment to improving any school system.  There are several reasons for this:

  1. They force teachers to focus on memorization and not learning
  2. They penalize students that are not good test takers
  3. They destroy student morale
  4. They stop educators from making the real reforms that are needed in education
  5. They have no scientific validity in terms of measuring student performance

The following comments are from a blog titled, “Here’s the Real Reason Why Public Education Will Never Get Better” by Shelly Sangrey

  • Schooling and education are two different things.
  • Education is about exploration and learning how to think.
  • Schooling (which is what our public schools are a part of) is about training and teaching children what to think.
  • Someone who is being educated will be told, “Do some research on this topic. Study the evidence, weigh both sides, and make an informed conclusion.”
  • Someone who is being schooled is told, “This is how it is because scientists, historians, and other people who are smarter than you have already figured it out. There’s no need to look into it further.”

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You cannot measure education.  You can measure training.  But even measures of training are more likely to reflect the ability of the system rather than the ability of the students in the system.

Where has this emphasis come from in terms of measurement and metrics?  The first is from politicians who have little or no knowledge of education.  They also lack knowledge of data analysis or statistics.  These so-called leaders are more than ready to jump on bandwagons that sound good to their constituents but actually have little value in increasing educational outcomes.

The second is from educators themselves.  Believing that if they show good rankings they can justify the money needed for higher salaries and more resources, many teachers support the idea of “pay for performance” or “measuring educational outcomes.”  These teachers know little about business concepts but are more than ready to accept that business principles can work in a school system.  Unfortunately, many business principles lack any kind of validity either for education or for business.  All over America today, we have accountants running businesses and schools.  Our systems are driven by short-term numbers and bottom-line thinking.  These are major contributors to the death of public-school education.

In Part 3, we will look in more depth at the role that our political leaders play in murdering public school education in America. 

Why Public-School Education is Dying – Part 1 of 5 Parts

15 Dec 2021 2 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,

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I debated whether to title this blog, “Why Public-School Education is Dead” or “Why Public-School Education is Being Murdered.”  The latter is absolutely true, the former will be true in less than twenty-five years (My prediction).  There are several reasons why public schools are dying.  But before I go into those reasons, I want to tell you why I think I am qualified to talk about this issue or should I say problem.  Mark my words, it is one of the biggest problems that any democracy or would-be democracy can face.

Democracy in America without a good public education program will fade away.  Some people will mourn the passing of democracy.  However, if the present is any predictor of the future, the number of people who care will decline with each passing year.  Democratic principles are not immutable.  They will whither and die if they are not nourished.  The most important fertilizer for a democracy is public education.

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Thomas Jefferson believed that Democracy cannot long exist without an educated citizenry. Jefferson argued that all children should be educated regardless of wealth, birth, or other mitigating circumstances.  He believed that free public education should be provided so that children from poor families as well as rich families would receive the knowledge they needed to function in a democratic society.  For more information on Jefferson’s educational ideas see the following:

Thomas Jefferson: A Bold Vision for American Education by Gordon E. Mercer

Thomas Jefferson:  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

My Educational Background

208219_00_2xI was an above average student until high school.  After starting high school, I spent the next four years being bored and getting into trouble.  I probably spent more time in detention than I did in the classroom.  Many teachers despised and loathed me.  My father kept thinking I would go to college which was some sort of a fantasy on his part.  With no money and my poor grades, there was not a single college in the country that I could have been accepted to.

A few weeks out of high school, which I barely graduated from (I think the teachers just wanted to get rid of me.) I decided to enlist in the US Military.  The year was 1964.  The Vietnam War was ramping up and the military would have taken anybody who could walk a straight line.  I joined the Air Force because I liked their uniforms.  I had hopes of fighting in Vietnam and being some sort of a war hero.  The Air Force decided that I would make a better Radar Technician than warrior and sent me to electronics school in Biloxi, Mississippi after basic training in Texas.

I did not want to go to school, and I resumed my antics in class which resulted in my being sent to see the base commander.  He gave me two choices.  One was to get my “ass” back in class and start behaving myself, the other was to spend the next four years painting barracks in Mississippi.  Perhaps wisely, I decided to pay attention.  I graduated second in my class and was sent to my first duty station.  It was a remote assignment at a Radar Base in Unalakleet Alaska. It was four hundred miles northeast of Anchorage on the Bering Sea.  It would get cold enough there for exposed flesh to freeze in less than one minute.

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The rest of my military career was uneventful.  After getting discharged from my last duty assignment in 1968 at Osceola, Wisconsin, I worked in a variety of different occupations.  I never attended any other classes while in the military and I had no desire to go to school when I left the military.  It took about 3 years of not getting anywhere career wise for my first wife to convince me to go to college on the GI Bill or at least try to go to college.  Getting in required my former high school counselor to say that my records were lost so that they could not see the comments and stuff said about me.  I was finally accepted into a college back in Rhode Island and thanks to the GI Bill I had some money to pay for school.  Nevertheless, it was not enough money to pay all the medical bills and household expenses.

I was married with a wife that had a severe medical condition and we had a three-year-old child.  Neither of us had any extra money, so I took a job working nights from 11:45 PM to 7:45 AM at a manufacturing plant.  I was “temporary” in that the man I replaced had lost his arm in the machine I would be working on.  I questioned the supervisor on any new safety protocols that had been adopted after the accident and was told to “keep your arms away from the machine.”  I would leave home at 11 PM to bicycle about six miles to work.  I would get off work at 7:45 AM and then bicycle to the college which was about 6 miles away.  We only had one car and my wife needed the car to take our daughter to day care and then she would go to her part-time job.  After finishing my classes, I would bike home from college which was another 5 or 6 miles.  Thus, each day for 4.5 years, I biked a round trip of about 20 miles, went to school full time, worked full time, and slept about 4 hours a night until the weekend when I would try to catch up on my sleep.  I also had to include time for studying, writing papers, reading and tests.

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In 1976, I graduated with a degree in K-12 Health Education, a minor in Biology and a second degree in Psychology.  I took a job at the Veterans Administration as a GS-7 Claims Examiner.  A year later, my wife and I moved back to Wisconsin and due to some marital problems she decided to leave me.  Several months went by.  We kept communicating and were able to work out some of our problems.  We decided to move back in together and give our marriage another try.  I decided to take advantage of a 9-month extension in GI Bill benefits to go to school for a M.S. Degree in School Counseling.  I completed the M.S. program in 1979.   I was hired for one year as a Biology teacher at Spring Valley HS.  I left after my contract was up and took a job as a teacher/counselor at Guadalupe Area Project (GAP) in St. Paul.  GAP was a school for troubled high school youth in the St. Paul, MN area.  I thought I could use my degree in school counseling at GAP.  I soon found out that at this school, I was a counselor, teacher, cleaner and anything else that needed to be done.  It was a fantastic experience.  The principal at GAP was Sister Giovanni.  She was one of the most remarkable people and educators I have ever been fortunate enough to work for.

downloadDespite efforts by my first wife Julia and myself, our marriage soon unraveled again.  We agreed to separate.  I moved out and wanting to change careers, I made the decision to go back to school and focus on training in industry.  I was accepted into a Ph.D. Program at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Vocational Education.  My major would be Training and Organization Development with a supporting field in Adult Education.  By this time, my GI Bill had run out and I was now living alone and paying child support.  I applied for and was accepted as a research assistant with the Minnesota Research and Development Center in Vocational Education on the St. Paul Campus.  This job together with several summer internships and a very frugal lifestyle enabled me to pay my bills, my child support, and my tuition.

downloadI completed my Ph.D. degree in four years and graduated in 1986.  My dissertation was on “Conflict in Organizations.”  I was hired by a management consulting firm in Bloomington, Minnesota.  I worked the next thirteen years as a trainer and consultant in both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.  In 1999, I joined the faculty of Globe University as a business instructor.  I had also been working part-time as an adjunct instructor at Metropolitan State University where I was employed for 16 years.  In 2015, I retired from Metropolitan State University.  I left Globe University when they closed their doors in 2017.

Since leaving full-time teaching, I have been doing a variety of substitute teaching assignments in the Casa Grande area of Arizona.  Karen and I have been splitting the year between Wisconsin and Arizona since 2010.  We live and work about six months in each state.  As a substitute teacher here, I have replaced Art, Drama, Band, Physical Education, History, Science, Special Ed, English, Spanish, Culinary Arts, ROTC, Mechanical Arts, Social Study, and Dance teachers.  I have substituted in every grade from kindergarten to senior high school.

I have taught as a regular teacher at every grade level from kindergarten to Ph.D. programs.  I have taught at Army and Navy depots.  I have taught at over 40 for-profit industries including Chevron Manufacturing, Whitman Manufacturing Company, International Nickel Corporation and Fletcher Challenge Corporation.  I have taught at hospitals, trucking companies, mining companies and in Canada, England, and Taiwan.

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I have also written several pieces on education which you can find as follows:

Social Legacy Systems:  How They Block Change and Prevent Progress:  Part 1- Education

Legislating Balanced Perspectives in Education

Creating a Twenty First Century Education System

Educational Arrogance: Why my degree is better than your degree

What is wrong with education today? Part 1 and Part 2

So that’s if folks, I have told you why I think I am qualified to speak about education and public schools.  In the following four parts, I am going to dive into the major issues that are leading to the death of public-school education.  I will conclude with some thoughts on what a new system of education will need to look like.  The impact these issues has is not limited to high schools but also manifests itself in grade schools and colleges.  In many respects, it is impossible to untangle the matrix that comprises the public education system in America.  When public school education dies, so will all forms of publicly provided education.  If you have a car and the engine is great but the transmission dies, the car will no longer run.  In any system, the goal or purpose of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  There will be no public education in America unless we provide for it.  It will either die or evolve.  That choice will be up to you.

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In the next four blogs, we will look at:

  1. Why our present educational model is obsolete
  2. How our politicians are helping to kill public schooling
  3. How our educational unions are helping to kill public schooling
  4. What a new model of education should look like?

Q’Anon Theory versus Critical Race Theory:  Who will win?

28 Nov 2021 2 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

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In the right corner wearing the red trunks we have Q’Anon Theory.  Enjoying 12 wins and 38 losses, Q’Anon is trying to make a comeback.  In the left corner, wearing the black trunks, we have the opponent, the much misunderstood and maligned challenger Critical Race Theory.  Critical Race f1ec5ba1-d5cc-49e4-a163-f18f9fe04f31_1920x1080Theory (CRT) comes into this match sporting a record of 25 wins and 25 losses.  Both opponents have lost matches to Trickle Down Theory and the Birther Theory.  The winner of this match will face the reigning champion, The Theory of the Big Steal.

This match will be judged by a panel of three judges.  One from the right, one from the left and one dead center.  They will use the “Rules of Scientific Procedures” to judge the match.  The match will be scored on six criteria.  The contestants will receive one point for a victory on each criteria.  In the event of a tie, there will be a sudden death criteria to determine the winner.

The six criteria are:

  1. The_Scientific_Method.svgThe testability of the theory’s major tenets
  2. The predictive power of the theory’s major hypothesis
  3. The theory is empirically based
  4. The theory is concise, coherent, systematic, and broadly applicable
  5. The theory has the ability to explain the aspects of a specific area of inquiry
  6. The theory has the ability to describe the causes of a particular phenomenon
  1. Testability of Theory Tenets:

best-pizza-in-washington-dcA theory may propose various tenets.  That is the theory will assert specific things that belong with the theory.  For instance Q’Anon Theory proposes that a group of Democratic politicians who are pedophiles meet regularly in the basement of a pizza parlor in D.C. to plot nefarious schemes for taking over the world.  One of the major tenets of CRT is the notion that racism is ordinary and not aberrational.  To measure the Q’Anon Theory all we would have to do is find a pizza parlor in D.C. where a number of pedophiliac Democratic politicians meet.  This would be an easy tenet to test since the number of good pizza parlors in D.C. can be counted on one hand.

The tenet from CRT that racism is ordinary and not aberrational seems to me to be more difficult to prove.  Indeed since most White people would say that they are not racist, I do not know how you could prove this tenet.

The judges score it 2-1 for Q’Anon Theory. 

That makes it 1-0 for Q’Anon Theory.

  1. The Predictive Power of the Major Hypothesis:

A key prediction of Q’Anon Theory is that Donald Trump would institute a series of mass arrests to break up the group of pedophiles and send them all to prison before they could destroy the world.  This prediction has not come true yet, but it still remains a powerful possibility given his favored son status among many in America.  No doubt if Trump gets reelected we are going to see a purge of his opponents that makes Stalin look like Mother Teresa.worthpoint.com-1929-PRESS-RE-ENACTMENT-PHOTO

A key prediction of CRT is that by confronting the beliefs and practices that enable racism to persist while simultaneously challenging these practices we will be able to eliminate systemic racism.

My opinion is that Trump will have a good possibility of getting reelected and I am certain that if he does, heads will roll, and it will be the end of democracy as we know it in the USA.  They will continue to call it a democracy but with Trump knighted as President for life and most of his opponents in jail, it will not be the democracy that many people now believe in.  As for the CRT hypothesis, I don’t think that we will ever eliminate personal racism and as long as we have personal racism, we will have systemic racism.

The judges again score it 2-1 for Q’Anon Theory. 

That makes it 2-0 for Q’Anon Theory versus CRT.

      3.  The Theory is Empirically Based:

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A theory that is empirically based is one that is based on facts and data rather than opinions and emotions. There is a lot of emotions on both sides here.  Everyone knows how emotional the right-wing faction of white supremacists are.  This side is full of hate loathing and hostility towards all things not white.  Equally emotional have been the Black Lives Matter protestors who have engaged in numerous protest marches over the deaths of numerous Black males by police officers.  I think the judges will find it hard to give either side a point on this criteria.

Unbelievable, the judges give both sides a point on this one.

That makes the score 3-1 for Q’Anon Theory.

  1. The Theory is Concise, Coherent, Systematic, and Broadly Applicable:

No contest here I am afraid.  CRT theory is anything but concise, coherent, or systematic.  As for broadly applicable, it does apply to most white people, but the world is also full of non-white people.  To illustrate what I am talking about, here is an excerpt from one of the leading textbooks on CRT.

“Our social world, with its rules, practices, and assignments of prestige and power, is not fixed; rather, we construct with it words, stories and silence. But we need not acquiesce in arrangements that are unfair and one-sided.  By writing and speaking against them, we may hope to contribute to a better, fairer world” — Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic “Introduction to Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. 3rd Edition, 2013”

I read the above several times before I could decipher what they are trying to say.  This is a big problem for the Left since they are too intellectual and academic.  No one can understand what they are talking about.  Now you take the right-wing supporters of Q’Anon, and you have a group that is not hard to understand.  Here are some writings from Q’Anon theorists.

  • donald-trump-make-america-white-againEliminate all communists
  • Eliminate all socialists
  • Eliminate all democrats
  • Eliminate all liberals
  • Eliminate all immigrants
  • Eliminate all non-whites
  • Eliminate all gays
  • Get all women back in the kitchen

What could be easier to understand?  Nothing circuitous or incoherent about these statements.  I am going to have to say that Q’Anon theory has my vote here.  It looks like the judges all agree.

It is unanimous, the judges give Q’Anon a point on this one.

That makes the score 4-1 for Q’Anon Theory.

Well, that’s it folks. Even if CRT took the next two points, it would still be Q’Anon Theory 4 and CRT 3.  The winner is Q’Anon Theory.

Stay tuned for our next match when we will have Senator Rand Paul face off against Dr. Fauci to decide who should get any more Covid shots and if the new Omicron Variant is real or just fake. 

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A Lament for an America that I Believed In

23 Nov 2021 16 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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I sit here looking out my window and wondering what happened to the America that I grew up believing in.  A nation that was founded on the values of truth, justice, and equality.  The land of the free and the home of the brave.  A country dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Today, I look out the window and see a country that bears no resemblance to the place where I thought I lived.

I look out and see rich politicians marching through the streets asking for more and more money to support their never-ending campaigns.  One election is no sooner over, then another one begins.  I give money to one candidate, and I immediately get phone calls, emails, and texts asking me to support fifty more candidates.  I am not worth ten percent of what most of these people want but they act as though I along with other Americans are bottom less pits of money.

abcnl_ahmaudarbery_1635976650478_hpMain_16x9_992I look out and see lawyers with Magna and Summa Cum Laude degrees from Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, and other Ivy League Universities who can fashion legal arguments designed to circumvent and pervert any sane person’s idea of justice.  They have corrupted our Criminal Justice System into a Criminal Injustice System.  The winner in a court room is the one with the most money who can hire the best and brightest lawyers.  An argument by one defense attorney claims that a self-styled vigilante shooting three unarmed people is a tragic case of self-defense.  Another defense lawyer for three murdering racists suggests that the victim in the case was shot because he had come to Satilla Shores “in his khaki shorts with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”

st,small,845x845-pad,1000x1000,f8f8f8.u13I look out and see corporate executives who will ignore the danger posed to the environment and climate because they can make more money today than by creating a sustainable system.  I see too many people willing to “shop till they drop.”  A materialistic mentality that supports the greed endemic in Corporate America.  A focus on short-term thinking that drains the earth of the resources it needs for sustainability in order to reap mega-profits today.  The “hell with the future” is the motto of Corporate America.

I look out my window and see a country wherein 74 million people supported a man almost totally devoid of ethics, morality, character, or conscience.  People who knew that this man was defective but instead voted for him either because they were racists, sexists, greedy or selfish.  A country where too many people discriminate against others who are different in race, religion, or gender identification.  People who will vote for someone because he takes vengeance against groups they regard as enemies.  People who will vote for a bully who is a coward and a draft dodger.  People motivated to support the candidate that will promise them lower taxes.  People who demand their rights but ignore their responsibilities.

I look out and see people that claim to be Christians but who call for their political opponents to be killed or assassinated.  People claiming that ethics and character do not matter as long as a leader will support their particular religious beliefs.  People who believe that Jesus came to preach vengeance and retribution rather than love and charity for all.

I look out a window where my views of America and the world are becoming more and more appalling.  Each day brings another senseless mass killing.  Tomorrow brings an even more bizarre crime into my consciousness.  I process some of these visions with friends mainly to check to see if I am going crazy or if my mind is becoming warped.

1623107527880_nn_mal_ca_road_rage_shooting_arrest_210607_1920x1080Is there any meaning to what I am seeing?  Am I just getting too old?  Is my brain incapable of understanding things anymore?  Journalists are murdered because they report the truth.  Innocent people are slaughtered while they watch a Christmas parade.  A pregnant woman is shot eleven times on her doorstep.  Fifty or more people rob a series of stores in what the news calls “mass grab fests.”  A six-year-old child is killed in a car seat by some maniac with road rage.  There is no bottom to the bizarre.  No one can imagine what the next day will bring.  All attempts to discover what is causing these problems or how they can be stopped seem futile.  They are meaningless crimes without rhyme or reason in a world that George Orwell would never have imagined possible.  Up is down, right is wrong, facts and truth do not exist, everything is fake.  There is no sanity.

Interlude:

A friend of mine once told me that you catch more flies with sugar than vinegar.  An old maxim to be sure.  He wanted to advise me that if I expected to get readers, I needed to write positive helpful pieces.  Ideas that would help make people’s lives better.  Ideas that were useful and people could do things about.  I have no disagreement with that bit of wisdom.

CG-Mtn-Trail-SMLThis morning while doing a 4-mile run in the Casa Grande Mountains, I thought a lot about his advice.  I realize that much of what I have said above could be considered a rant.  I would like to think it was somewhat of a catharsis.  Another friend told me yesterday that I sounded like a man in despair.  I resonated with the word despair.  I regard optimism as ideologically unsound given our present world.  Many people have advised me to stay hopeful.  There is a fine line between hopeful and optimism.  I am not sure I can manage the divide.  Despair on the other hand fits my mood just fine.  Despair is defined as: “The complete loss or absence of hope.”

What does my mood do to my readers?  Well, I can always say “Don’t read my stuff, if you don’t like it.”  I don’t get paid to write.  I don’t sell you anything.  I don’t even put commercials up on my site.  On another level, I write for myself and no one else.  I mentioned the word cathartic before.  Writing is one way, I feel alive.  I gain some hope from sharing my ideas with others if only one person writes back and says “Yes, I agree with you.”

Hope springs eternal, right?  But we need some foundation for hope.  Can hope be built on fantasies, unrealistic ideals, and wishful dreams?  How does reality impact our chances for hope?  Can hope exist when reality denies any possibility of hope?  I am not sure I know the answers to these questions.  I think I might have to go on a quest for hope.  In the meantime, I will go back to my window and tell you what else I see as I look out at the world.

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I look out and see a nation which was built on the assumption that checks and balances would protect a new democracy.  The legislature, courts, and executive branches would each provide a check and balance against the unbridled assumption of power by any one sector.  The basis for this assumption was the belief that each branch would have the best interests of the nation at heart and not partisan interests.  This of course was never 100 percent true but never has there been the divide and partisanship that exists in the USA today.

download (1)We have elected people that will support an insurrection against free and fair elections.  The most important element of Democracy.  People that prefer to ignore that on January 6th, we almost had a coup against democracy in America.  On November 17th, we had these same people vote to ignore the censuring of one of their comrades who parodied the killing of an opposition opponent.

The foundations and pillars of Democracy in America are rotten.  Jefferson believed that democracy could not survive without an educated informed citizenry.  Information would come from a free and impartial media while education would come from a system of free and impartial public schools.  The media today are nothing but paid shills for corporations who spend vast amounts of money on advertising designed to get people to stay in debt buying stuff that they don’t need.

81XUsTIXJxLI look out my window and see a public school system that is being dismantled by racists, bigots, elitists, and sexists who do not want the schools to actually teach anything that might be construed as controversial.  Two thousand five hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for trying to teach the children of the Athenian elite to think for themselves.  Schools and educators are still being attacked for trying to teach children to think.  How can our future generations create a better world when they are besieged with information that keeps them in a past that never existed and feeds them myths about the way the world works?

I look out and see people who are more worried about the shortage in Christmas trees and the price of gasoline for their vehicles than about getting a virus shot or the problems of global warming or environmental pollution.  Citizens who sacrifice at the altar of lower taxes while complaining about the rising inflation.  An inflation they blame on a President while they ignore their own cupidity and its relationship to the law of supply and demand.

The End?

Many so-called Christians say the end is near.  Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead.  I don’t believe that anyone is coming to judge anyone else.  I don’t believe that our planet is near its end.  I don’t believe that there will be any kind of a global conflagration.  I do believe that the end of the American Experiment is very near.  We should have a clock for democracy like the doomsday clock.  The doomsday clock is supposed to tell us how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making.  The present time of the doomsday clock is 100 seconds to midnight.  We need a “democracy clock” that would tell us how close we are to losing democracy in the USA.  I would say that we are at one minute to midnight.

74 Million Americans voted for a man who does not believe in democracy.  A man who does not believe in our military, our schools, our courts, our media, or our system of elections.  It would be foolish to think that these 74 million voters believe in any of these systems either.  Thus we have nearly 31% of our electorate who either do not understand democracy or would prefer an oligopoly.  We have 34.2 percent who did not bother to vote.  The remainder or 34.8% voted either Democratic or other party.

51FOE8gFffL._SX326_BO1,204,203,200_Will the USA survive?  All great empires have eventually declined.  It took 300 years for the Roman Empire to fall after it began its decline.  We are witnessing the decline of the American Empire.  How long will it take to fall is well beyond my ability to foresee.  If history is any indication, it will take many years and the decline will be gradual but punctuated by episodes of tragedy and elation.  The tragedies will far outnumber the elations.  Study any system in decline and you can see the gradual disintegration that accompanies all declines.  It is already clear that our Public Education, Political Systems and Legal Systems are in decline.  Trying to stop the declines is futile.  You cannot stop the decline of an old bridge or an old building.  You must rebuild from the ground up.  Sadly, I see neither the drive nor the desire to do the work that needs to be done to help restore democracy in America.

Organizations Trying to Make a Difference

https://www.demos.org/

Behind the Curtain:  The Corporate Plot to Upend Democracy

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https://standtogether.org/

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https://www.raze.org/  RAZE’s mission is to educate, advocate and coordinate in rural communities so they may gain access to civic education, engagement opportunities and voter registration

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Legislating Balanced Perspectives in Education  

16 Oct 2021 9 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , ,

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/southlake-texas-holocaust-books-schools-rcna2965

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There is a movement afoot all over the USA for what one might call, “Balanced perspectives in education.”  Every intelligent person understands that there is usually more than one perspective on things.  History and even science can be prone to paradigms that today are considered “absolute truth” but tomorrow are found to be wrong.

History is told from the perspective of the conqueror and tends to leave out minority views.  Science is based on theories which are formed on existing facts and evidence.  However, there is seldom enough evidence to prove any one theory to be 100 percent correct.  Science is a system of successive approximation.  Over time, new evidence is developed, and science revises existing theories.  In many cases, we have seen old theories replaced by new theories.

Thus, on the face of it, one might wonder how any logical or rational or sane person could question this new move to “Legislate balanced perspectives in education.”  Well, consider what I said earlier, “There is usually more than one perspective.”  The fact that there is more than one perspective does not render all viewpoints or opinions as equally valid, truthful, or accurate.  Some perspectives are more accurate than other perspectives.  Some theories are superior to other theories.  The new move is being legislated by stupid (yes, I said stupid) politicians and political leaders who know nothing or just about nothing about science and education.  The move to insure “balanced perspectives” is being dictated by politics.  There is no concern for the truth and there is no concern for science by those passing these laws to insure “balance in teaching.”

I propose a list of issues that should be taught without ANY balance in perspectives.  I propose this list because all the existing facts and data support the validity of these events or happenings.  Within ten minutes of thinking about this list, I came up with over 100 issues but in the interest of expediency, I will stick to my top ten.  I doubt any of you would want to hear my total list.  Notice my key word is NOT:

  1. The moon is NOT made out of green cheese (Perhaps Wisconsin Swiss)
  2. Elvis Presley is NOT alive and living upstairs in Graceland (He may be living in the basement)
  3. You will NOT go to hell for being LGBTIQA+
  4. If you do not support Trump, you are NOT a Traitor (Violent disagreement here in the Republican party)
  5. The world is NOT flat. (Not sure it is round either)
  6. White people are NOT superior to Black, Latino, Asian or Indigenous people
  7. Christopher Columbus did NOT discover America. (He wasn’t even looking for it)
  8. Christianity is NOT superior to other religions
  9. Greed in NOT good (Never mind what Michael Douglas says in Wall-Street)
  10. John Persico is NOT a genius (I can make an exception for this one)

A teen aged girl who lives in Texas came home from school one day and was met by her mom.

Daughter:  Our teacher was telling us about the Holocaust today when one of the other students said that his dad told him the holocaust never happened.  That the Jews made the whole story up for sympathy.

Mom:  What did your teacher say?

Daughter:  Well, the teacher looked at a list of “alternative perspective” issues that she keeps on her desk and replied, “You may be right.  Let’s look at the other side of this issue.  We will consider that the Holocaust is a made-up story, and that six million Jews did not die.”

Teacher:  On one side, we have millions of people who can testify that the holocaust actually happened.  We have video tapes.  Physical evidence of gas chambers.  Evidence of bodies.  Evidence of survivors.  Evidence of soldiers who liberated the camps.  Memoirs, written descriptions by noted people and the fact of the Anti-Jewish laws promulgated by the Nazis.

Teacher:  However, on the other side.  The side that disputes the existence of the Holocaust we have the belief that all of the evidence I cited above is “Fake.”  All of the testimonies are lies and part of a grand conspiracy to make Jews the superior race.  We have hundreds of right-wing nationalists and anti-Semite’s who believe that all the evidence supporting the Holocaust is fake and make-believe.

Teacher:  Now that I have given equal time to both perspectives on the Holocaust issue, we can move on to discussing the “Big Lie.”  That the last election was actually stolen from President Trump.

The following day the teacher was fired for not adequately balancing her view of the two perspectives concerning the Holocaust.

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An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.   — Mahatma Gandhi

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion.  The great task in life is to find reality. — Iris Murdoch

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